Just another unauthorised virtual world fansite
At Fantasy Faire 2017 we had a special visitor as part of LitFest, author Seanan McGuire.
Seanan made a couple of appearances during Fantasy Faire 2017, the first was an interview with Saffia Widdershins.
The second included Seanan reading from her own work.
Continue reading “Second Life Visitor Seanan McGuire Wins A Hugo Award For Best Novella”
The sixth annual Lovefest takes place in Second Life August 17th – August 27th. This is a festival to celebrate the work of HP Lovecraft.
An inworld notecard at the Lovecraft inspired Innsmouth region provides the following information :
LoveFest 2017 is the 6th annual HP Lovecraft Festival of Second Life. LoveFest schedules to occur 7-10 days around the birthday of our “patron author” HP Lovecraft – August 20. This year’s Fest will take place August 17-27, 2017, celebrating Mr. Lovecraft’s 127th birthday.
Each year LoveFest prepares a full sim dedicated solely to this event, including:
The Kingsport Merchant Quarter and Waterfront:
Kingsport, Massachusetts – a city out of Lovecraft Lore, known as a community of artists and artisans which thrives mostly from tourism. Featuring dozens of stores of merchants from all across Second Life, our theatre and a full schedule of entertainment and activities for all,
and waterfront warves of market and other interests.
The Miskatonic University Expedition Pier:
Office and staging site for the renowned Miskatonic University’s
worldwide exploratory and research expeditions, this year
taking enlisting team members for a voyage to a remote area
in the South Pacific for a deep sea exploration task force.
Continue reading “LoveFest In Second Life Opens August 17th”
Elves may have their ears in Sansar but Dwarves have a fortress! Even better than that, and probably of far more interest to you, is the fact that the creator of The Dwarven Fortress, David Hall, has been featured in a Sansar Creator Profile video produced by Draxtor Despres.
The video is short and I’ll embed it at the end of this post but it gives a nice insight into a Sansar creator as well as some of the tools of the trade.
Continue reading “Creator David Hall Paves The Way For The Rise Of The Dwarves In Sansar”
Improbable are an interesting company, they have a product called SpatialOS which comes with a blurb of :
Improbable’s SpatialOS platform gives you the power to seamlessly stitch together multiple servers and game engines like Unreal and Unity to power massive, persistent worlds with more players than ever before.
Worlds Adrift is the game that most gets mentioned when it comes to Improbable but they have a Games Innovation Program in conjunction with Google that may be worth a look for smaller developers.
An article on MCV by Improbable CTO Rob Whitehead caught my eye for a few reasons. One reason is that Rob Whitehead was once a teenage Second Life weapons seller. Another reason though is how Rob talks of the development process, which might go some way to explaining some of the thinking behind Linden Lab’s Sansar Creator Beta model :
When building a platform, one of the first challenges is persuading developers that experimenting with it is a good use of their time. The next challenge is learning from all the fantastically inventive ways developers find the edges of your tech.
This is an interesting approach which may explain why some features end users would like to see in different developing platforms appear later in the process.
Continue reading “Improbable Development is Possible By Listening to and Watching Developers”
Inara Pey has an excellent blog post regarding a couple of meetings between Bjorn Linden (Bjorn Laurin, Linden Lab’s Vice President of Product), Widely Linden (head of Product for Sansar), Pete Linden (aka Peter Gray, aka Gray of the Lab from San Fan Francisco, Linden Lab’s Director of Global Communications), Xiola Linden (Second Life Community Team Manager) and users of Second Life and Sansar.
The post is really important in terms of where Sansar is at this point in its development, where it’s going, why it’s called creator beta at the moment, why Linden Lab built their own engine and much more, it’s a really good read.
Meanwhile I’ve been attending meetups in Sansar, taking no notes, but making observations and I’ve found these meetups very beneficial in terms of enjoying Sansar and getting an idea about what I might like to do with Sansar.
The meetups are largely voice based but conversations do take place in text too. This helps people find the text chat module and interact with each other, add friends, look at the features available and share knowledge of the platform.
I’ve recently reported how impressed I was with the mouth movements inside Sansar when avatars talk due to the integration of Speech Graphics technology within Sansar. Inara’s post touches upon this in a couple of important areas, firstly in terms of how detailed the Sansar avatar is :
The Sansar avatars are actually extremely, extremely advanced. I would actually go so far [as to say] they are among the most advanced avatars there is today, on any platform. Just the female avatar in Sansar has over 125 bones in the face, to make it work as we want it, to make it look realistic. That’s more than actually humans have.
I want you to build your own avatars. for now that technology we put in is so new, no-one else is using it, we’ll be able to use it for a long time, to make it look realistic, and that’s part of it. When they talk normally it’s going to look better as well, it’s going to look better, in any language, it doesn’t matter. It may Chinese, could be English, could be Swedish, could be Portuguese, Spanish. It’s going to look good. We’ve spent a lot of time on that, and I’m super excited about these small things that make it immersive, that make us want to spend more time in there.
I certainly agree on the point regarding this being a small point that makes Sansar immersive because I found this small detail to be extremely engaging but there’s an added side of this too when it comes not just to people using avatars, but also in terms of NPC’s, inclusiveness :
So you can imagine scenarios whereby you have an NPC [non-player character] that has a whole dialogue embedded within it that the user’s interacting with, and you’re not only getting a reasonably synthesised voice, but you also have the facial animations that go with it automatically – and they look convincing. So you have facial animation that’s at a quality that a lip reader probably could get information from it. And that’s something that we have right now in Sansar that is not available in other platforms; not just yet, anyhow.
The reason that this came to my attention though was because I was at a meetup in Sansar and noticed this technology at work due to interactions with other avatars.